


Holding On & Letting Go

by theclaravoyant



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 5x22 Coda, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Jemma Grieves, deals with canon kind-of-MCD after the fact, s5 coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 12:04:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14894307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: It feels as though every step toward finding him is a step away at the same time, and it’s impossible to describe the way it feels – this particular brand of heartbreak – even to herself.-In the wake of Fitz's death and impending rescue, Jemma deals with a complex kind of grief and loneliness and hope. Set 5x22/S5-6 hiatus. Angst with a Happy Ending. FitzSimmons focus, ft. Mack and May.





	Holding On & Letting Go

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "'I love you,' said before we jump.", for anon, and also, "Jemma breaks," for florchis (and for all of us).
> 
> In the wake of Fitz's death and impending rescue, Jemma deals with a complex kind of grief and loneliness and hope. Set 5x22/S5-6 hiatus. Angst with a Happy Ending. FitzSimmons focus, ft. Mack and May.
> 
> Contains references to canon MCD, and low level descriptions of injuries. Rated T.

_It's everything you wanted._  
_It's everything you don't._  
  
\- [Holding On and Letting Go, Ross Copperman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eab8WrL--q8)

_-_

 

Sorrow seeps through every inch of her.

She listens, not so much patient as numbed, as Mack recounts the story. At first, that’s all it is, a tragic story, but the weight of it slowly bleeds into her heart like water into concrete. It takes root. Her heart is squeezed, is cracking as her blood slowly freezes, but it does not break. Not yet. 

“I’m so sorry, Jemma,” Mack says, his voice trembling with sincerity and grief, tears still shining in his eyes as she is sure they are in her own. She is not sure what to say, or what will come out if she opens her mouth, so she just nods. 

“May’s outside with him,” Mack offers, “if you want to say goodbye.” 

She swallows, and nods again. 

“Thank you.” Her voice is barely audible, all of her strength diverted to the effort of holding herself together, in one piece. Mack recognises the steely look in her eyes. He knows her type – like May, like Bobbi. He knows she would not take it kindly, to have to break in front of him. 

“If you need to talk…“ 

Once more, Jemma nods. Mack takes his leave, not knowing how long she has left before the news cracks through. 

Jemma turns toward the door. Her concrete strength is doing its job, keeping her upright as she takes step after step down the hall toward the hangar where May will be waiting. Her breath enters and leaves her chest like clockwork, just enough to stop her from falling. Her mind conjures the image of Fitz, running down the hallway toward her like he’s done so many times before. She can’t help but imagine him throwing his arms around her, his breath on her neck, warming her chilled blood after another close call. 

But she reaches the end, and the hallway is empty. 

May waits at the bottom of the ramp of the Zephyr, with a stretcher and a body bag.

“Is that-“ Jemma’s lips can hardly form the words. Her voice doesn’t dare fill them with enough air to reach across the distance. But May hears, May understands. May nods. 

“Piper and Davis are clearing one of the med bays.” 

Jemma doesn’t ask why. She just follows May, one step in front of the other as she stares at the wheels of the stretcher, rolling and bouncing along the ground. She doesn’t have it in her heart to question why they are not taking him straight to the morgue. It is cold down there, and dark, and full of dead people. Fitz hates it there. 

(He doesn’t care much for the med bay either, but it’s not as though he has a choice.)

Piper and Davis emerge from the room they’ve chosen just as May and Jemma arrive. May pushes on through, to get Fitz settled, but Jemma lags by the door, a few steps behind. Piper mumbles an apology, and Davis avoids her eyes. For a moment, Jemma wonders if he’s thinking about his wife and her hands automatically move to touch her wedding ring. She takes a deep breath, but she can’t escape the thought that their forever has been so brutally cut short to just a few days. 

“Jemma,” May encourages. “He’s waiting.” 

She wipes her face, catching a few stray tears, and pushes forward through the veil of her own reluctance and into the room. The body bag is open, Fitz laid out on the table as if he is sleeping, but even his sleep is not so lifeless as this. Jemma has never known him to sleep so still; without his cheek mashed into a pillow, his limbs askew. She almost wants to shift one of his hands so that it dangles over the edge of the table. At least that way he’d be a little more himself. 

May presses her lips together. The tears are shining in her eyes too, and she grits her jaw tighter and tighter. She has already held herself together for so long. Through the recovery. Through the flight home. If she watches Jemma crumble she’ll be lost and they can’t have that, not yet, so she conjures just a little more strength, lays a hand on the young woman’s shoulder, and says with as much sincerity as she dares: 

“Take as long as you need.”

They both know it’s not a promise she can guarantee to keep, but it’s enough for Jemma. It’s enough for now. She leaves and shuts the door behind her, leaving Jemma and Fitz alone together once more. 

Jemma steps up to the table. There is a strange confidence to her movements, as her body has not yet realised the deep and all-consuming truth of the evidence laid out before it. Piece by piece, she matches up the reality with Mack’s story. Fitz is still covered in dust from the rubble. One of his legs is broken – and badly by the feel of it, though it has been somewhat straightened out for appearance’s sake. There’s a large patch of blood at his side, where the metal sheet must have pierced, but it has long since finished flowing.

It’s at this point in her examination, that Jemma’s brushes Fitz’s hand. She looks down, tears blurring her vision as she wonders if this is the hand Mack held while he died. She holds it now anyway, and her heart cracks a little more when he makes no quip, not even a flinch, at the coldness she knows lives in her fingers. Holding him, it’s much harder to think in analytical terms. She no longer sees a map of his injuries; she can no longer ignore that this, lying before her with the warmth slowly draining from his skin, is the man she loves. (Or is it, _was?_ and _loved?_ )

She touches his chest, where his heart no longer beats, and thinks of all the times she has laid over it at night. She brushes his cheek, his skin still soft, but no longer creased in a smile or a frown of concentration. 

Then there are his eyes. 

They are open in death, staring into the abyss, and as she gives up wiping her eyes and simply sniffs and blinks against the endless tides, Jemma knows that this would have been enough. But it’s worse. She knew it would be. She knows he’s been dead long enough for it to be. It’s just, something inside of her hadn’t quite recognised it until this moment, when she feels it hit her. Death has stolen the colour from his eyes, which confirms what she has always known but never truly quite believed since this whole thing started: that it has done the impossible. It has taken him from her. 

Sorrow like water in her veins, in her bones, in her heart, cracks her concrete strength. Tears no longer leak from her but pour, and sobbing does nothing to contain them. Her knees tremble and she falls to Fitz, sliding her hand up his chest to cup his face and cry and cry when he doesn’t move his arms to hold her. She tangles her fingers in his hair as if she can will him to open his eyes, to look at her, or press his forehead against her own. All she can think is that it feels like the wool of a lamb and it’s clotted with blood and she cries even harder. 

She cries for a long time, and it’s not until an even longer time afterward that she realises she’s stopped.

She’s sitting on the floor of the med bay with her back against the leg of Fitz’s table. She turns his wedding ring slowly in her hands. It should mean nothing to her without him, it’s simply a dressed up piece of metal from a second hand store, but she feels the stars when she looks at it. She feels the way he held her hand in his. The smile on his face when Coulson declared, _I now pronounce you man and wife._

 _Man and wife._

Over the next few months she will think back on this miserable moment, sitting alone in the rubble of her broken heart. She will feel it again: the despair, the lonely ache, even when she knows there is another Fitz to fight for. When she is lying alone in bed she will miss the feeling of his chest and when she is cold she will put on his jumper and each time it will smell less and less like him. When she is hungry she will hear his voice, bitching and moaning, and when she has a breakthrough in a case, she will hear him celebrating. Sometimes it will get her up off the floor, and her heart will feel full and her cheeks like smiling and her feet like dancing. 

Sometimes it will feel cold. Like he is looking forward to his own forgetting. 

Because once she finds him, surely this ache must go away? This loneliness, this grief? Shouldn’t she want it to do so? Yet it breaks her heart to hope as much. Fitz is woven into the threads of her life irrevocably. The fact that he is gone should hurt forever. There is a small piece of her that should always be sitting here, on the floor, missing him. He deserves nothing less, and she would give it willingly to the man who has brought her so many years of companionship, of joy, of love, of peace. 

And yet. Does he not by the same token deserve the very life for which he died? Wouldn’t that piece of her that mourns him be better employed in the enjoyment of her life with him? Isn’t that what loving really should be? Living for each other, as easily as dying? 

It feels as though every step toward finding him is a step away at the same time, and it’s impossible to describe the way it feels – this particular brand of heartbreak – even to herself. The others understand that there is no standard, no process, for this, but for the same reason they can offer her no real help. Only their support, and the promise that she will survive and work it out. She believes them, that somehow this will be true, but she wishes it were as easy as understanding the science of it: that two Fitz’s could not exist in the same timeline; that one of them was doomed; that this one died so that the other could live; that the other was the same man. But it is not the same. Not for her. And he will not be the same. He will be a whole different brand of mess, fresh from the Framework and from six months in prison. She will have been through what she’s been through, and he will have done what he’s done, and he will have no idea. There is no theory, no formula for that. It is all emotions and unpredictability, and that has never been her strong suit. 

So it is with a strange and complex sense of terror that Jemma receives the news: 

 _We’ve found him._

At first she’s excited, so excited, and so relieved that she could cry. She does, in fact, and hugs Daisy so tightly she wouldn’t have been surprised if there was spinal damage. But as they shuttle out to the ship where they have found him, all her doubts begin to come back. He could be hurt. He could be angry, twisted and bitter. He’s not going to understand why Daisy is still more hurt and angry than she wants to be. He doesn’t know what’s happened to Coulson, or to Talbot, or to Deke. He’s not going to know that he married her, and that the ring she wears on her necklace now belongs to another version of him. It’s going to be hard, so much harder than she thought, to tell him all these things and as she unloads medical supplies for the rescue her mouth is dry. It feels like she’s staring at an impossibly high brick wall. An impenetrable forest. A fathomless ocean. What will he ask her? What will she say? 

“Stay behind me,” Daisy insists, waving a hand, and Jemma obeys. Waits. They break through the door. Lower their weapons. 

“Enoch?”

“Ah, Miss Johnson,” the Chronicom greets. “Miss Simmons. I’ve been awaiting you. Or should I say – we have.”

For once, Jemma doesn’t have time for the questions that reel through her mind. Where they are. How it is that Enoch is alive. She shunts them aside, her body moving automatically, and with a fervour born of an instinct so consuming she almost forgets to breathe. Enoch has gestured to a cryopod in the centre of the room and for now that is all she sees. She walks to it, and through the tiny window in the front she can see his face. 

Fitz. 

Her Fitz. 

A different one, sure, but more the same than she had ever expected. And his lips are frozen in the slightest of smiles, and his eyes are open, still staring at nothing, but they are a deep and unfathomable blue. They are a colour Jemma thought she would never see again save in her dreams. A colour that does not exist in the world outside of Fitz’s impossible eyes. 

“Would you like to do the honours?” 

Jemma looks up, and finds that Enoch is holding out a small loop of metal. Some kind of key, she realises, as she peels her arms away from the cryopod and sees where it must be inserted. 

“Whenever you’re ready,” Enoch says, unfazed by her choked-up throat and shaking hand as she reaches for it. He simply shakes his head. “This one is needed elsewhere. You’ll see.” 

And just like that, Jemma knows where she has seen the ‘key’ before. She can feel it, burning a hole into her chest. She pulls Fitz’s wedding ring out on its chain and her patched up heart aches a little for it. Of course this would be the way. In one last rush of desperation, she looks around at Daisy, and Mack, and May. Maybe they can save her, she thinks; maybe they can find a way that she can have both Fitzs at once. But they cannot. They are simply waiting for her, as gently as they can. 

So Jemma wipes the tears from her eyes and looks inside herself, expecting to find once again that doubt. That despair. Expecting to hear a little voice whispering that things brought back from the dead are never the same, and that the Jemma crying on the med bay floor will never again have a heart whole enough to love with. This time, though, all of those things are silent. She has never been one to trust in her emotions, but what she finds this time, she recognises. It’s a rare feeling, for her, and she has learnt to treasure it. It is certainty. It is a firmness in the knowledge that despite chaos, despite fate, despite time and space itself, Fitz is always fighting for her and she is always fighting for him and that if their whole lives have been leading them anywhere it is always toward each other. Always to a moment of choice just like this one, where they will always choose each other. Where they will get through whatever they are facing, somehow, together. Again, and again, and again. 

That was the promise they made, she thinks as she wraps her hand around the ring. To always choose each other. To hold and help and heal each other. Without Fitz, this is just a piece of metal. It is not him. It is not any version of him. It is not even her memories of him. It is just what it is – and fortunately for her, that is his rescue.

So with the forest of strength that she has grown from the many broken dams of her heart, Jemma unclasps her necklace.

“I love you,” she whispers, and kisses the ring, the old Fitz, one last time. Then she slides it free of its chain, and presses it into the awaiting place on the cryopod. She steps back as the mechanisms twist and turn, and the lid unseals and slowly creeps open. Vapour hisses. Fingers find the edge of the lid and push it open, and Jemma is frozen in place, in awe, as Fitz sits up and looks at her and scowls in confusion.

“Jemma?” he wonders. “What are you doing here? I was- I was just coming to rescue you. Had a speech prepared and everything.”

“I know,” she chokes, tears spilling over her cheeks and the empty necklace chain falling to the floor as she opens her arms and reaches for him. “I’ll explain later. Come here, you wonderful, wonderful man.” 

He climbs out of the pod as if he’s forgotten he was still lying inside it. The minute his feet touch the floor he topples forward and stumbles into her arms but she catches him and together they fall. He clasps her hands and smiles up at her and she strokes his hair, soft and curled and clean. 

“Sorry,” he breathes. “Jelly legs. Been in there for a while, I guess. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Are you okay?”

He smiles hopefully into her tearful eyes, and the only answer she can give him is a kiss.


End file.
